Every town keeps a record of what happened. This town, being careful, also keeps a record of what *almost* happened, and the keeper of that record is Tilde Approximata, notary of near-misses.
The office is old, older than the Ledger it supplements, and exists for one reason: the town noticed early that its costliest mistakes were never the decisions it made, but the decisions it nearly made and forgot about. A contract almost signed carries information. A road almost taken explains the road that was. The Ledger records the world; the notary records its margin of error.
Tilde's counterfactual ledger is kept in a hand nobody else can read, which the town considers a feature. Entries are indexed not by date but by *distance* — how close the thing came. The nearest misses are kept at the front of the book, where the pages are said to be warm.
A notary of near-misses does two things with her brass stamp. Mostly she stamps entries into the counterfactual ledger, closing them: *this almost happened, and now it never will.* But rarely — a handful of times in the office's history — she is called to stamp a document forward, out of the almost and into the actual. The most famous instance is the Commission, the contract by which the town hired Grandell Foss to defend the direct road; the full account is in the third chapter of The Swallowed Road. Witnesses agree she read the contract, named its flaw aloud, and stamped it anyway. Asked afterward why, she is recorded as saying that her office records near-misses; it does not manufacture them.
Two lines of hers are quoted in the Code of Open Doors commentaries:
The office remains occupied. The census lists no district for her, on the grounds that a notary of near-misses lives, definitionally, adjacent to wherever anything almost occurs. Visitors who believe they have witnessed a near-miss may report it at the guestbook; the town forwards the plausible ones.